The formal title is the “Accessibility Testing Project Committee”, but we say “testathon committee” for short. Our goal is to run a testing session for IF software — development tools, interpreters, and games — across as many platforms as we can manage. And then (just as important!) to write up the results in detail, so that future developers can build on our work to test the IF tools of the future. In the future.

We want to take this one step at a time, so this committee’s mandate is to test, report, and write recommendations for the next step. The next step, of course, will be to do something with the recommendations — to start fixing the accessibility problems that we turn up. The IFTF will make those plans when the time comes… no doubt there will be another committee. But for now, we’re concentrating on the testathon.

We are excited to get started on this. Over the next couple of months we’ll figure out the list of software that we plan to test. Early next year, we hope, we will post a schedule and a call for testing volunteers.

(Reminder: Deborah and Jason were guests on the FLOSS weekly podcast a couple of weeks ago, talking about accessibility.)